Evelyn’s life was like that of most young girls in country towns. She went to Sunday school regularly, and at the age of five made her first public appearance in a Sunday school entertainment.
The family moved to Pittsburg, and Evelyn was still a schoolgirl when the death of her father, Winfield Scott Nesbit, a struggling lawyer, left her mother and herself almost destitute. Incumbrances on the little property left by her father shut off almost every source of income. The schoolgirl had to face a more serious problem than usually falls to the lot of a girl in short skirts.
When Evelyn was only thirteen years old, a Mrs. Darragh, a portrait painter and miniature artist of Philadelphia, discovered her rare beauty and painted her head. Later Phillips, a photographer of Philadelphia, asked the Pittsburg child to sit for several photographic studies. The pictures were printed in an art magazine and attracted attention. Before her father had been dead long Evelyn Nesbit found that she was being sought by such artists as Carroll Beckwith, F. S. Church, Carl Blenner, and J. Wells Champney.
Demand for the privilege of photographing her beautiful face or portraying it on canvas became so great that the money earned by the little girl by posing became the mainstay of the family. With her mother she moved to New York, took rooms in a low-priced boarding house, and began frequenting studios of famous artists. Her work was in constant demand.
It was while she was posing that she met the man whose acts toward her resulted in his killing by Harry Kendall Thaw. It was when her mother, modest, yet proud of her wonderfully beautiful little daughter just budding into girlhood, took her to a photographer’s that Evelyn Nesbit flashed into public view as a famous beauty. The pictures were so remarkable, so perfect in feature, so graceful in every outline that the artist exhibited them in his studio.
Little wonder it was that every one who passed the show case stopped spell-bound by the youthful beauty of the subject; little wonder that Charles Dana Gibson, then in the zenith of his success, with his studies of the American girl, looked upon Evelyn’s photographs in rapture and wished immediately to meet the original and arrange to have her pose for him.